A poor bunny rabbit is exposed to the molecular duplication ray — and its evil opposite is created, in this amazing clip from Captain Planet and the Planeteers. The new Captain Planet DVD set is full of equally ludicrous moments.

Like the making-of documentary, which explains that Ted Turner is the second smartest thing on Earth:

The making-of documentary, By Our Powers Combined, is a priceless viewing experience, for its combination of cheesetastic clips from the original show and insanely earnest interviews with everybody who was involved in making it. In addition to finding out that Ted Turner came up with the basic idea for the show because of his realization that he's the penultimate in Earthly intelligence, there's tons of other insights to be gleaned.

The producers also talk about trying to get Captain Planet away from the macho, white male archetype of superheroes, by making the Planeteers totally multi-culti and including Gaia as the source of their powers. And the reasoning behind giving Ma-Ti the utterly ridiculous power of "Heart" — which is actually a kind of telepathy and is needed to animate Captain Planet's body.

So how has the show aged after all this time? About as well as you'd expect. The early 1990s preachiness (and Captain Planet's mullet, which co-star LeVar Burton makes fun of in the making-of featurette) look totally ridiculous after 20 years. This show was never anything but silly, but it's become almost transcendently silly with the passage of time. It's well worth picking up, so you can expose your kids to the cartoon that may have helped to shape your own environmental guilt activism. And so you can laugh at the incredibly cheesy attempt at shoving a Serious Message down kids' throats — while perhaps feeling a bit sad that it didn't really do much good, in the end.

In addition to the insane storylines, where Duke Nuke'em (not to be confused with the video game) and Ed Asner's Hoggish Greedly attempt to despoil the environment, there are also some utterly amazing PSAs. Like this "Buy Recyclables" one: